Audit Culture: How Indicators and Rankings are Reshaping the World

‘A powerful and definitive critical diagnosis of the effects of audit culture on individuals, organisations and society. Essential reading’ Michael Power, Professor, LSE

‘A visionary book’ Marilyn Strathern, Emeritus Professor, University of Cambridge

All aspects of our work and private lives are increasingly measured and managed. But how has this ‘audit culture’ arisen and what kind of a world is it producing? Cris Shore and Susan Wright provide a timely account of the rise of the new industries of accounting, enumeration and ranking from an anthropological perspective. Audit Culture is the first book to systematically document and analyse these phenomena and their implications for democracy. 

The book explores how audit culture operates across a wide range of fields, including health, higher education, NGOs, finance, the automobile industry and the military. The authors build a powerful critique of contemporary public sector management in an age of neoliberal market-making, privatisation and outsourcing. They conclude by offering ideas about how to reverse its damaging effects on communities, and restore the democratic accountability that audit culture is systematically undermining.

Cris Shore is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Central European University. One of his recent publications is The Shapeshifting Crown. Susan Wright is Professor of Educational Anthropology at Aarhus University, Denmark. One of her recent books is Enacting the University. Together they are co-editors of the Stanford Anthropology of Policy book series.